Der Spiegel tells the story of a man who sells of pews and furniture from dying churches. And he is doing a land-office business. “Some 4,400 church buildings remain in the Netherlands. But each week, around two close their doors forever. This mainly affects the Catholics, who will be forced to offload half of their churches in the coming years. ‘And that’s just the beginning,’ says de Beyer.”

For years the number of faithful has been declining. The trend has swept across all of Western Europe, with churches forced to close in France and Belgium too. But in the Netherlands, Christianity’s retreat from society has been particularly drastic. The Protestant Church alone loses some 60,000 members each year. At this rate, it will cease to exist there by 2050, church officials say.

de Beyer thinks of himself as a rescuer of temples. He wants to preserve their value. His instructions are meant to help distinguish between the valuable and the worthless. He often personally shows up to the churches to provide guidance and support. Pews and Bibles are usually sold to members of the congregation.

“Altars often find new places in Eastern Europe,” says de Beyer. “There’s a big demand there because new churches are always being built.”

But it isn’t just the churches that are dying. Mark Steyn writes that Europe itself is racing its old churches to the graveyard. It isn’t just the churches that boarding up the windows. It’s the factories, the schools and the families.

The problem with the advanced West is not that it’s broke but that it’s old and barren. Which explains why it’s broke. Take Greece, which has now become the most convenient shorthand for sovereign insolvency — “America’s heading for the same fate as Greece if we don’t change course,” etc. So Greece has a spending problem, a revenue problem, something along those lines, right? At a superficial level, yes. But the underlying issue is more primal: It has one of the lowest fertility rates on the planet. In Greece, 100 grandparents have 42 grandchildren — i.e., the family tree is upside down. In a social-democratic state where workers in “hazardous” professions (such as, er, hairdressing) retire at 50, there aren’t enough young people around to pay for your three-decade retirement. And there are unlikely ever to be again.

The New York Times featured the town of Laviano in Italy. Only half its houses were occupied. But any closures of its churches were the least of its problems. It’s problem was even worse: it didn’t have enough kids to keep the schools open. The newly elected mayor “racked his brain and came up with a desperate idea: pay women to have babies.”

Laviano is not unique in Italy, or in Europe. In fact, it may be a harbinger. In the 1990s, European demographers began noticing a downward trend in population across the Continent and behind it a sharply falling birthrate. …

For the first time on record, birthrates in southern and Eastern Europe had dropped below 1.3. For the demographers, this number had a special mathematical portent. At that rate, a country’s population would be cut in half in 45 years, creating a falling-off-a-cliff effect from which it would be nearly impossible to recover. Kohler and his colleagues invented an ominous new term for the phenomenon: “lowest-low fertility.”

What happened? The problem as Steyn succinctly puts it, is that socialism not only “runs out of other people’s money”, as Margaret Thatcher once put it. It simply runs out of people. Future historians, if there are any left, will puzzle over how this came about. The economists will have an easier time explaining it. Through some process, socialism has apparently increased the discount rate to the point where the future is consumed for the sake of the present. Not only is investment taxed to feed consumption, tomorrow is hocked to pay for today.

If the fiscal deficit is the direct monetary expression of this high discount rate, the collapsing population is its equivalent demographic expression. Both are saying the same thing, in different terms. In incentives terms, the future is no longer real; so people don’t save up for it nor do they have any incentive to sacrifice for it.

Steyn points out that one feeds into the other. By failing to provide for the next generation to feed present consumption, the present West has also reduced its capacity to service the debt when tomorrow rolls around.

As Angela Merkel pointed out in 2009, for Germany an Obama-sized stimulus was out of the question simply because its foreign creditors know there are not enough young Germans around ever to repay it. The Continent’s economic “powerhouse” has the highest proportion of childless women in Europe: One in three fräulein have checked out of the motherhood business entirely. “Germany’s working-age population is likely to decrease 30 percent over the next few decades,” says Steffen Kröhnert of the Berlin Institute for Population Development. “Rural areas will see a massive population decline and some villages will simply disappear.”

If the problem with socialism is, as Mrs. Thatcher says, that eventually you run out of other people’s money, much of the West has advanced to the next stage: It’s run out of other people, period. Greece is a land of ever fewer customers and fewer workers but ever more retirees and more government.

Ironically this outcome was baked into socialism from the beginning. It was suspicious of “tomorrow”– that place where the worker would enjoy his benefits — and preferred to consume things today. The most hated tomorrow in socialist opinion was the Christian heaven. It was the “opiate of the people”; the object to which they lifted their eyes the better not to see the miseries of the present. The sooner man was rid of heaven and its earthly equivalents, the nation or the country, the better the new man would be. As John Lennon knew, the best way to understand socialism is to imagine a world without tomorrow.

Imagine there’s no heaven.
It’s easy if you try.
No hell below us, above us only sky.
Imagine all the people living for today.

And that is precisely what the welfare state consisted of. Living for today. Social security is a perfect example. It was never a “fund”; it was never anything more than a payroll tax moving money from young workers to old workers. For it while it seemed to work, but only because the West was running on the legacy of a generation that believed in tomorrow and had sacrificed its life and youth in World War 2 to secure it. The “living for today” lifestyle resulted in the spectacular party some may remember at the end of the 20th century: an era that valued unlimited sex, unlimited welfare, and sacrifice for God and country not at all.

Imagine there’s no countries.
It isn’t hard to do.
Nothing to kill or die for.
And no religion too.

And then the music stopped. This was the silent scene where we came in at the beginning of the screening: the churches closing at the rate of two a week; the factories closing even faster. What Lennon failed to grasp was that any society that had nothing it would sacrifice for would find nothing worth investing in. And so here we are, dragging on the end of our smokes, tipping over any bottles that still might contain some wine. Because the vineyards are barren and will stay that way. The ultimate problem with “living for today” is that tomorrow eventually comes.

100 Comments, 100 Threads

1.
stoicheion

Good poast Wretcherd, although you skipped the 800 Lb. gorilla in the corner.
Not that I’m channelling Whiskey but when women stop being women( IE: having babies) Society WILL collapse. Notice that the birth rate in the 3rd world is quite robust.
Having a baby is tough work. Having observed it close up 3 times I understand why a lot of young women take a pass.
Historians will measure the decline of the west from the start of women’s sufferage.

Don’t worry though. All those churches will become Mosques over the next few decades. Islam has no silly theory regarding the equality of females. They are at war with the west precisely because we are attempting to force our theory of gender on them.

Socialism as a politic and process may just be an outgrowth of urbanization of the population, the migratory pattern of modern homo sapiens. History is littered with the rise and fall of great cities and urban centers and the technological and cultural evolutions to sustain them, their power and their glory. History is also littered with many failures created by their own behaviors of various flavors.

And so we get to the root of the malaise. If the rest of society is committing suicide then that is destiny and the rest of are just along for the ride. The only way to break the west out if this cycle is to shutdown the banks and end the era of fiat currency. The increase in corruption through easy fiat money so closely correlates to the decay of the culture of investing in the future that this can be no coincidence.

Ron Paul’s first move would be to push for currency competition. By making gold and silver legal tender (and thereby eliminating all taxes on them) he would break the monopoly and lie of fiat currencies and enable people to save and invest in the future with honest money instead of wall street confetti. This would be one of many first steps in turning the suicidal direction of our culture. What I really find sad is that there is no politician in all of Europe that even approaches the integrity, knowledge and experience of Ron Paul, and Americans should be proud to have him. He is the only thing in decades that is uniquely American that the US can hold up to the rest of he world, yet very few BC contributors realize this.

4. ConfederateH
The problem with Ron Paul is he thinks the world is a warm and fuzzy place. It ain’t so. At least not in this world.
In Ron Paul’s world there are no Saddam’s, no Assads, No Stalins, no Pol Pots, no Ide Amin’s.
No blood thirsty tyrants who would enjoy sending troops up the Potomac to capture D.C and put the government to the torch.
What, you say that can’t happen? You are correct but only because the US Navy wouldn’t let them. Then the US Air Force would bomb the sh1t out of the SOB.
Paul seems oblivious to the fact that ALL politics are based on POWER.
His only chance is to come right out and say he is an isolationist and explain why he feels that policy is in America’s interest. Hints and evasion just make him look like a weasel and a nutty weasel at that.
His domestic policies are great but without a power based approach to the rest of the planet, they don’t matter. Some Mullah who isn’t afraid of power and blood will be running America and it will be that Mullah’s policies that matter.

#1 Stoinhion As I recall, Whiskey posited destruction of Western Civilization via enforced feminization of our culture. He asked why a male would ever marry now, with rampant legal and job prejudice. With anti-male education schools pumping out male-hating gradeschool teachers, and reduced job/promotion prospects, from female preferences, why even try? With churches like the Church of England and its goofy archbishop, who would remain a member? The earlier “self esteem” post points out worthless degrees, but omits emphasizing core evidence. Degrees are certificates of propaganda, not thought. English and “humanities” openly teach only hatred for Western culture. Males can’t tolerate the hatred and BS, so increasingly don’t go to college – its 60-40 female now at the universities which foist these destructive propaganda degrees in exchange for unrepayable debt. What could be more destructive to civilization than an army of wymens/black/gender studies, “social justice” teachers and journalism graduates with enormous self-esteem and enormous debt and reluctance to work? Why try to work? Why marry? Why try to take responsibility for a family? Why not be like Europe?

“Ron Paul is he thinks the world is a warm and fuzzy place… In Ron Paul’s world there are no Saddam’s, no Assads, No Stalins, no Pol Pots, no Ide Amin’s.

This statement is patently untrue but it happens to be exactly what the Republican establishment wants you to believe.

Dr. Paul believes that every office holder should follow the constitution and obey the oath they took. Only Congress can declare war. Ron Paul would force congressmen to go on the record and be responsible for what the government does. Dr. Paul would stop the executive from waging secret wars all around the world. Dr. Paul would repeal all previous presidential decrees because they are unconstitutional. This in no way infers anything about the existence of or how bad the enemies are. It is really quite simple, do you want the government to be constrained by the constitution? Or perhaps you want some unelected groups of people controlling foreign policy and the entire MIC and waging never ending wars against “terrorism” while enacting constitutional rights raping acts like the patriot act and the NDAA. The choice is really that simple.

[5] And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

[6] But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

[7] But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.

I was more surprised to learn that there are 4,000 Catholic churches in the Netherlands than that a couple a week are being closed and sold off. A pox upon upon anybody who helps turn a church into a mosque.

The more I bump around the nooks and crannies of the postmodern process the more I keep bumping into Nietzsche. Not that the guy had any answers mind you, but he sure seemed to see the enveloping darkness.

If you haven’t already read Allan Bloom’s the Closing of the American Mind you may want to. It explains a lot about how we got here. Suffice it to say that Chomsky hates this book – and Allan Bloom too.

Socialism Homosexuality and Islam are a counter-intuitive three legged stool. Each are variants on Nihilism.

This blog has many commentators who claimed that the US was safe because it had a core community based in the Armed Forces that preserved traditional values. They were wrong. They failed to see that institution was a target and that it was vulnerable. The engineered photograph of two lesbians kissing on the pier when the same ship that had been used by the SEALS to kill Somali hijackers returned from a deployment was a triumphalist marker for the Left as significant as turning Hagia Sophia into a mosque or raising the red flag over a captured capital.

The villages of Europe will be filled by Muslims, who will breed like rabbits and submit to Authority. However Islam is a dead end that can only thrive as a parasite while there are other more productive groups to feed off of. Most of the Muslim dominated countries only subsist on transfer payments from energy exports or exported labor. Once the economy collapses, as it will if the oil runs out or consumers develop new sources or the consumer societies die off under the pressures described above, then demographic collapse will follow. That failure to sustain an economy is what lead to the Arab Spring revolts. Demographic collapse for Islam, at least in the Middle East, will follow.

It is my belief that Ron Paul is aided by allies of the far left and supporters of Obama. His followers include bigots and he encourages Truthers and other fantasists who weaken us.

The only historical event that compares to the current European and East Asian fertility crisis is the Black Death. But the plague only killed off a third of Europeans. The fertility crisis will kill off two-thirds to three-quarters of Europeans and East Asians. God only knows what comes next.

11 Blast from the Past:The engineered photograph of two lesbians kissing on the pier when the same ship that had been used by the SEALS to kill Somali hijackers returned from a deployment was a triumphalist marker for the Left…

Because there’s no commandment against killing people in the Bible, just a commandment against two women kissing. Check. I don’t want to start a debate about whether it is right or wrong to kill thieves rather than apprehend them, but that sure is an interesting mindset, that sending teenagers off into eternity bothers you less than a lesbian kiss.

7. Jaybird:What could be more destructive to civilization than an army of wymens/black/gender studies, “social justice” teachers and journalism graduates with enormous self-esteem and enormous debt and reluctance to work?

Science Major: “Why does it work?”
Engineering Major: “How does it work?”
Women’s Studies Major: “Would you like fries with that?”

The post modern liberal utopians of the West did not need to campaign against religion or childhood to eliminate these threats to its goals. It simply had to ignore them.

If there is nothing left requiring risk there is no need of creation. Life moves as on a conveyor belt driven by forces unknown. An act of faith means risking losing ones place in line on the people mover.

“The world’s now cold, featureless, and culturally dead; nothing really new has been created since the Overlords came … there’s nothing left to struggle for, and there are too many distractions and entertainments.”

Arthur C Clarke – Childhood’s End

In the novel by the time the children are gone humanity is ready for its extinction. There is no fight left in them. The Euros are not mourning the loss of their religion or children. They just want to figure out what to do with the leftover real estate. If the silence and loneliness of having it all becomes too much to bear there will always be a Dr. Conrad Murray to turn up the Propofol drip.

My latest comment on the “No Worse Friend, No Better Enemy” thread is highly relevant to this discussion. And while I would certainly agree with the maxim that more Belmont Club is always better, I have to admit that Our Host’s recent bout of Lope de Vega Syndrom is making it difficult to carry on a conversation in the comments. That post is now buried deep in the stack where nobody is likely to read it. Rather than doing the cut and paste thing again, I will simply provide the link here. Please read it if you wish.

One more thing which the low birthrate does: it raises the average age of a population considerably. When the average age of a population is fifty or sixty–the people always most likely to vote–that means true change is unlikely. And for the young it will take many years of experience to abandon the ideas they were carefully indoctrinated in. We saw the fruit of that poisoned well in 2008.

Churches close. Old churches don’t always fit the needs of modern life. Sometimes it’s just the pews from the blonde-finish-wood 1950′s church that need to go, getting replaced by some comfortable seating. Sometimes it’s better just to build a whole new church building.

Sometimes, if a new congregatation-buyer can swing it, the old church will be preserved as a quaint chapel while the congregation worships in an attached, new, comfortable, practical worship space. Young couples like to get married in the old church, and parents might like to schedule a baptism there, but that’s all it’s used for.

What’s replacing the churches in Holland? Is it no church or new church? (The number of believers is shrinking, but what is the future for believers?) In the U.S., de-churching continues in mainstream protestant and Catholic churches, but membership is growing in non-denominational churches.

If anyone wants to take the pulse of contemporary Christian experience in Spain, put aside the journalism about religious life and book a flight to Seville to experience Holy Week, starting on Palm Sunday and ending on Easter. Religion is what believers do, not only what they say in response to surveys. (The reign of the Virgin is by no means over, whatever that may mean in the big sweep of Christianity.)

“The social capital and “return on investment” earned from investing time and energy in community and other social networks has been replaced by a check from the Savior State–a transfer payment that surely beats the troublesome work of investing in community in terms of risk and return. The net result of the Savior State dominating society and the economy is the rise of a pathological mindset of entitlement and resentment–the two are simply two sides of the same coin. You cannot separate them. Once self-reliance has been lost, so too has self-confidence been lost, and the Savior State dependent–individual and corporation alike–soon distrusts their ability to function in an open market. This is a truly sad, self-destructive state of affairs, and deeply, tragically ironic. The calls for “help” quickly lead to dependence on the Savior State, and that dependence quickly breeds complicity and silence in the face of repression and predation by the State and its corporate partners.
In a very real sense, citizens relinquish their citizenship along with their self-reliance and self-worth once they accept dependence on the State.”

Two predictions for the new year: The Savior State will continue to run up unsustainable debt. The Spirit will blow where it listeth.

Many thanks to Mr. Fernandez and the Belmont Club for a remarkable 2011, and best wishes for 2012!

I certainly do not have the solution to the population problem. I would have liked to have been married and raise children but I refused to give up my free will, something that seemed a requirement in the bargain. I used to think it was just me but now I’m not so sure. I am too old fashioned for this brave new world.

Not all third world countries are experiencing population growth. Some are stagnant and declining. Some are in such economic dire straights they are going to have a die off due to lack of imported food. It could be argued that Iran is not technically speaking third world but it does have declining population that is getting older.
California has a lot of natural advantages, climate, fertile soil (at least when irrigated. But they have wasted and spoiled. The productive class is moving out so how long will the parasites be able to feed themselves. In a way California looks like a future opportunity. What happens if it goes de facto bankrupt and the state government ceases to function? Does it revert to territorial status? Could a conservative controlled federal administration take over,take names, and kick behinds and set it on the road to recovery.
While main line churches have been declining, non-main line basic services types are growing. Even Catholic Churches that offer the old Latin services are see some recovery.
I wonder how well the Arabs in Europe will fare when the welfare money stops. So many of them are uneducated and pig ignorant and couldn’t make it even as peasant farmers anymore.

ConfederateH @8 wrote: “Ron Paul would force congressmen to … be responsible for what the government does. Dr. Paul would stop the executive from waging secret wars all around the world. Dr. Paul would repeal all previous presidential decrees because they are unconstitutional …” …. yadayadayada … (you skipped stopping the oceans from rising) … this is a tall order for a cowardly little twerp who won’t even own up to his obvious involvement with his sleazy newsletters, those newsletter with which he apparently enriched himself to the tune of well over a million dollars.

It’s pathetic that the Paul’s supporters are anointing this nasty little clown as some combination of Jefferson and William Tell (that reference is for you, CH).

There is so much with which to discredit Paul. On of my favorites is his statement that 13 year old black males should be prosecuted for crimes as adults because they are so dangerous.

I would not lay the blame for the decline in birth rate on Socialism alone. I would say it is the consumerist culture that is more to blame. The lack of deisre to sacrifice, and live only for today. Both completely un-Christian principles. The lack of desire to sacrifice has lead not only to a reduced number of children (their expensive you know..how can we pay for our travel, toys, big houses, urban apartments, clothes, etc. if we have children?) but has also contributed to the degradation of morals worldwide. This colapse of morality has becoming an endless loop in which we are now trapped.

Fortunately there is a fix, a reset button if you will. Jesus is returning soon to rescue his friends, and start all over again, this time without sin and death. Make sure you are one of his friends. Take time to talk to him every day. Would you make an extra effort to help an old friend you havent heard from in years? The good thing is Jesus has promised to always pick up the phone, all you have to do is call. He is waiting to rekindle the friendship, or start a new one. Pray not only for yourself, but others you cherish. This is really the only hope we have of truly surviving into the future.

Through some process, socialism has apparently increased the discount rate to the point where the future is consumed for the sake of the present.

Gee I like the sound of that, cuz I think that’s just what the banksters have been doing to the US for fifty years. But that’s simply short-sighted greed, IMHO, they do it because they can, and eating the seed corn always seems like a party to some. OK there’s a bit more to it, but that will do for a summary.

But after all, I’m not going to go all simple-minded on this like a LuapNor-bot, but that means I have to try to squeeze a complex argument into this little text box. Society is a specialization of function, and we have to trust the system and other members. I don’t have any seed corn in my home. That all happens – elsewhere. I don’t even choose politicans much on their farm policies, and I sure hope the farmers are not eating all the seed corn, or selling it all to China. But when socialism concentrates power, some pinhead official may decide we don’t need any corn, sell the whole lot to China to make room for a solar yeast farm, and then when that fails, we’re ALL in trouble. Market systems depend on that kind of destructive concentration never happening, but it does happen in unregulated markets, it has happened in our unregulated financial markets, too much power in too few hands. And no simple solutions in sight. Eliminating centralization and power is not the answer, I don’t want to grow my own corn. The answers are in that complex middle.

What we have now is a Democratic party that wants big answers, trillion dollar this, Obamacare that. Big answers go awry. Political parties don’t grow corn or build solar cells. It’s cheaper and easier to sell the farm equipment to the Chinese and redevelop the land into a golf course. And ten years from now when the Chinese sell you corn for three times what it costs to grow it yourself, will you tear down the golf course and buy a tractor? But you’ve been in the red for ten years and don’t have the capital, and have forgotten how, anyway, and the local city council won’t approve because the caddy’s union has filed suit.

Power corrupts, there is no doubt. And a cutback in power is what we need, but moreso a management of the power we have, and that’s just difficult. So electing simpletons who simply want to shut it all down, is maybe the one thing we could do worse than what we are already doing.

Actually – a cutback in power is not quite correct, Machievelli will tell you that, or King Lear, it is a matter of holding that power in check, if you abjure it, someone else will pick it up and smash you with it.

(yes, it seems the simpleton has the good idea of reducing power, and may attract followers who think he may succeed in moving us a little in the proper direction thereby, but throwing a wrench into the machinery is just what is worse than the problem, you don’t want to stop the car by ramming a tree at 60mph)

What do we want then, what do we need? Someone smart like Newt, who hopefully for some dogmatic reasons knows enough to doubt his own knowledge. A competent bureaucrat, that Mitt likes to represent himself as. Someone who won’t break more than he builds, and if he can even build a little extra, better yet. Someone who is a leader and consensus builder, because we’re not electing a god-king, just a chief administrator who still needs hundreds of sub-chiefs to detail the plan and carry it out by engaging the entire country – not to mention the Congress that has the actual power to do anything at all, and that is supposed to comprise our more direct, localized connections to the whole. And we need to be skeptical of someone who claims they have a magic wand or 10% dividends forever or fix it all without our needing to participate. It’s always going to be hard work, but that’s OK, we’re good at it, amazingly good at it given world history, so let’s get to it.

The problem with a Ron Paul presidency is he can’t solve these problems simply as chief executive. Of course that is also why a Ron Paul presidency will not be a total disaster, he has limits to his power. Might be fun as an exercise as long as he is willing to propose action to slash and burn federal regulations, their agencies and cut, cut cut the spending. No one else represents the type of change we actually need, the antithesis of Obama.

For the past 40 years, technology, legal and cultural changes all fueled the sexual revolution. It has been a disaster, because it was not a new thing, a revolution, but a reversion to pre-Christian and even pre-pagan chaos.

I pray that it’s not already fatal to the civilization. Sex is decoupled from marriage, marriage from child-rearing, and marriage from a lifelong commitment. The result is an unstable marital culture and a zero-sum game between the sexes. This, too, will only be a short stop (a generation or two) which, left unchecked by spiritual renewal, will result in a full reversion to something worse. I don’t know where it ends up (e.g., Islam, eastern patriarchy or tribal chaos), but historically it always ends up with the devaluing of women and their reversion to something like property.

It is not just women who got us here — men and women, both left and right, fully participated in this mess. Heck, I participated in it.

The demographic collapse is partially caused by the sexual revolution. (Other key elements included loss of faith and the fact that we have an extremely child-unfriendly culture, both in terms of mass media and economics.)

24. Willy – The lack of desire to sacrifice has lead not only to a reduced number of children (their expensive you know..how can we pay for our travel, toys, big houses, urban apartments, clothes, etc. if we have children?)

Prior generations had a hand in this. Good schools cost $50K per year and basic starter homes are $250K – a college-educated couple has to dedicate some years to dual income earning just establish themselves and maintain loans, health insurance, a savings plan and decent cars. How prepared is anyone at 26-ish to start a family when on paper it’s foolish to do so? They delay it until their heads are above water and risk fertility issues at 32, 36, 40, whatever. Of course there are fewer children; if it wasn’t for various time-honored irresponsible behaviors we’d hardly have any.

But to Don51 at #2–that is easy to explain. There are not paying professions on the plains, there were in the cities surrounding the plains (or on the coasts). But with the oil boom in North Dakota, who knows, you might see an upsurge of some population.

Dear confederate redneck, read the below replies and read them good. I have lived around your type for a long time and mostly, your patriotism angle is complete bu**sh*t! In the south, where I am, guess who own and run almost all if not most of the gold and silver exchange shops? You guessed it, the south will rise again types. Trying to convince people that fiat money needs to go away so that you have all the money is not PATRIOTIC! (but of course you knew that you are just a liar).

“It is my belief that Ron Paul is aided by allies of the far left and supporters of Obama. His followers include bigots and he encourages Truthers and other fantasists who weaken us.”

“There is so much with which to discredit Paul. On of my favorites is his statement that 13 year old black males should be prosecuted for crimes as adults because they are so dangerous.”

Thank you for reminding me of Gerard’s recent posting at American Digest about the young NARAL solicitors who came to his door one night. He is one of several men I know who regret their earlier participation in the current culture of abortion. As you say, it isn’t just women who are responsible for the demographic crisis.

Market systems depend on that kind of destructive concentration never happening, but it does happen in unregulated markets, it has happened in our unregulated financial markets…

By what standard are our financial markets unregulated? They are some of the most regulated industries around. Banking, lending, insurance, stock brokerages… In fact, it was the regulation that allowed the destructive concentration (which you are correct to point out is incredibly dangerous). When you look under the covers (well, not even really under the covers any more, you just need to ignore the MSM hand-waving), these industries are lousy with political connections. It’s those connetions, and the influence peddling among the regulators, that allows, almost forces, the concentration.

Consider two middling sized banks, one without political connections and one that hires Senator Blowhard’s son-in-law and Congressman Freezercash’s nephew. The high regulatory burdens gradually squeeze out the unconnected bank because the corrupt one always seems to get a break on the regulations and some government sugar whenever it needs a little extra cash. Eventually it has the money and leverage to buy out the clean bank.

Actually – a cutback in power is not quite correct, Machievelli will tell you that, or King Lear, it is a matter of holding that power in check, if you abjure it, someone else will pick it up and smash you with it.

The Founders had the formula – divide it up and scatter it. But I think you are not giving enough credit to actual market forces. You think if someone shutters a federal agency, the power that used to be concentrated there will become concentrated elsewhere. Not true, not unless some other government agency picks it up or hands it out. Return the power the the market and the market will quickly tear it into scraps and scatter it to the four winds, reducing the chances of a ruinous concentration.

It is surprising no one has yet mentioned the obvious solution to demographic decline, one that is in full swing as we speak, viz., mass immigration. I’ve read that unqualified immigration is the only thing now stopping the U.S. from going backwards demographically. What would Europe look like without 20M+ recent arrivals from Turkey or Pakistan or … somewhere?

The problems with such a scheme are evident (and extant) but to amoral transnationalists and doctrinaire liberals it is a crime to speak of it. We grumble about illegal immigration but does anyone with a public voice seriously question legal immigration, either qualitatively or quantitatively? Or contemplate the seemingly inviolate status of refugees and asylum-seekers? There are numerous reasons why any country may consider immigration to be a net good; a moribund birth rate should not be one of them.

People are not limitlessly interchangeable but we have been led to believe they are.

“Through some process, socialism has apparently increased the discount rate to the point where the future is consumed for the sake of the present. Not only is investment taxed to feed consumption, tomorrow is hocked to pay for today.”

Two clever sentences that added a smile to my breakfast. Biological and financial arithmetic will operate and by the time the nickel has worked its way through the machine things will be simpler. I agree with emrys @ 19. Life will go on.

Utopia is like a forest fire that burns up timber that was set aside for a future generation’s harvest. A fire endangers people who take refuge in a creek by sucking all the oxygen out of the air so they can’t breathe. Eventually the fire consumes everything, leaps the creek and moves on. Now the people in the creek can breathe again. Like the fire, Utopia sucks all the oxygen out of society and suffocates it. Once all of Utopia’s fuel has been consumed, society will breathe again. That’s assuming there are creeks available to provide a cool water refuge, of course. What was that stuff about churches closing their doors?

W: “As John Lennon knew, the best way to understand socialism is to imagine a world without tomorrow.”

Ultimately it is even worse than that. In the end socialism is the political expression of a collective death wish. Socialism is not just throwing in the towel regarding the worship of God and having children – socialism means throwing in the towel regarding life its self.

“The proposition that a striving for self-destruction is the main impulse in socialism has been extracted from a multi-stage analysis of socialist ideology… Understanding socialism as one of the manifestations of the allure of death explains its hostility toward individuality, its desire to destroy those forces which support and strengthen human personality: religion, culture, family, individual property. It is consistent with the tendency to reduce man to the level of a cog in the state mechanism…” Igor Shafarevich

Whichever nation/culture finds a way to make every woman who is fertile enough to do so in its society understand the need to make sacrifices to her standard of living and lifestyle and actually have three or more desired children in stable marriages, and establishes the basic unit of society as the family rather than the apparatus of state, will be the one left standing 100 years from now.

Certain beliefs have a survival value. Among them the idea that to step off a cliff leads to a fall; that lions tend to eat one; that 1 plus 1 equals two. People who have these beliefs are more likely to live than those who don’t. What is often unappreciated is that the idea of transcendence — that a priori conviction of individuals that their lives are part of something bigger — also has a survival value.

It’s most direct manifestation is pack behavior. The willingness of an individual member of a hunting party to run risks for the group. It shows up in family or clan behavior in the instinctive willingness of a father or mother to fight for the survival of the young, often at the cost of his own life.

In more complex organizations like armies it manifests itself as bravery; the willingness of someone to die for his friends. They roll on grenades, jump up on tanks and hold of hundreds of SS, they crash-land their F4F Corsairs on Korean mountain sides to rescue another crashed pilot; they lead parties into red hot ammunition magazines with a leaky hose after a Kamikaze attack.

It manifests itself in patriotism; in the willingness to buy bonds for a national endeavor; to serve in its institutions. It manifests itself in notions of God, which have allowed exiled peoples to maintain themselves even in the face of the most fearsome persection — even concentration camps — and endure.

The a priori idea within man that something is greater than himself leads paradoxically to a more survivable society than one in which he is the only object in the universe. A man with a transcendent idea can give his time or life for that greater thing. Societies which lack this idea really discount the future to the point where it is only of conjectural value.

For societies to whom that something greater is real, the discount rate is low enough for the future to be something palpable and sacred to them. Though you can argue that Heaven is but an illusion designed to lead fools on, you can also take the view that it is simply the generalization of all that we know already — that the future exists for us — even if we do not see it clearly. It existed at least in the sense of posterity, if only we had the eyes of faith to see it.

Buliwyf: ‘Lo, there do I see my father.
Herger the Joyous: ‘Lo, there do I see My mother, and my sisters, and my brothers.
Herger the Joyous: ‘Lo, there do I see The line of my people…
Edgtho the Silent: Back to the beginning.
Weath the Musician: ‘Lo, they do call to me.
Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan: They bid me take my place among them.
Buliwyf: In the halls of Valhalla…
Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan: Where the brave…
Herger the Joyous: May live…
Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan: …forever.

Hokey? Perhaps. But helps them stand and in so doing, sometimes to survive. Paradoxically, Hope and Change is not about the future at all. It is about consumption in the here and now. About bigger entitlements; greater benefits; more abortion, wider open borders and accelerating the draw-down the common defense. Even the Space Program has been retasked to making Islamic societies feel better about themselves. Does that not summarize Hope and Change? Feelgood now. It does not seem to be about much else.

It doesn’t even want to know how this consumption is going to be paid for. “Hope and Change” may mean Eternal Debt for the coming generation but so what? Yet any system which habitually kicks the can down the road can’t have much regard for the road; because its discount rate is such that, like the inflation it will bring, it is better to have convenience now and put off the evils of tomorrow for the day after and the day after.

Someone argued that what we believe in is shown by what we do. And Europe by its acts seems to proclaim, loud and clear, that ‘we are not even interested in showing up tomorrow. We are not going to meet the most fundamental test of survival, which is to be there when tomorrow comes.’

Well thanks for letting us know bub. Real hope is basically a conviction that however gloomy the night, the dawn is real; it is a determination to survive. Marxist ‘hope’ is nothing but a conviction that we should party now because the night is all and maybe we can survive if the authorities let us. If so, there is nothing left to say to them but “good luck and buh-bye”.

It was argued by the banksters, and accepted by the (supposedly) free-market Republicans, that the rational self-interest of the banks in an unregulated market would prevent failures. Bzzt, wrong. The Democrats, apparently, were simply bought off.

However, you are right in that it is not regulation as such, in fact it may be the “regulation” that creates the moral hazard, that is the problem, it is putting the taxpayer on the line to make up losses, while not taxing the winners at a sufficient rate so that they *are* the taxpayers who make up for the losses. Just broad-brushing the 1% is not the way to do it, it is neither fair nor accurate. In fact, once the worms are out of the can, it’s hard to see how to recover gracefully. So at the least we need the additional “regulation” of Glass-Steagall, and arguably we need further regulations so that moral cesspools like AIG are forbidden even on the open side – they are an invitation to losses so great that they cross the firewall. We make Ponzi schemes illegal, and CDS is not significantly different when it is run as dishonestly as AIG is doing it.

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I’m in a bad mood today because I have a bad job offer on the table that I will either have to reject or accept, and neither action is going to make me happy.

Ha, it is my own little battle of the Somme, this would be my own n’th time through the same mill with the same employer, don’t I ever learn? Perhaps I should try anything else, whatever the risk.

“The 13th Warrior” was a vastly underrated movie that never gained the audience it deserved. It was a very thoughtful movie that dared to address the issue of what it meant to be human in the moral and spiritual sense. The New Criterion’s James Bowman wrote an insightful review of the movie; check it out at his website.

It seems ever more obvious to me as the years lengthen since the defeat of the Axis in 1945 that the two world wars of the 20th century did incalculable damage to the moral and spiritual fabric not just of Western Civilization but of all humanity. Fitzgerald grasped this as early as the 1920s when he wrote, in Tender is the Night, about the Battle of the Somme:

“This land here cost twenty lives a foot that summer. . . . See that little stream–we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it–a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation. . . . This western-front business couldn=t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relationship that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back farther than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and post cards of the Crown Prince and his fiancee, and little cafes in Valance and beer gardens in Unter den Linden, and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”

“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in ’65.”

“No, he didn’t–he just invented massed butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurttemberg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love-battle–there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last great love battle.”

“You want to hand over this battle to D.H. Lawrence. . . .”

“All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high-explosive love.”

Ultimately it is even worse than that. In the end socialism is the political expression of a collective death wish. Socialism is not just throwing in the towel regarding the worship of God and having children – socialism means throwing in the towel regarding life its self.

I’d say support for socialism is just the juvenile desire not to have to worry about tommorrow, to let someone else take care of it for you. It’s the response of coddled children used to getting things for the asking who are slapped in the face by their first taste of the real world and whine to mom and dad. Prosperous societies seem to do a lot of coddling that way.

The implementers of socialism though, they’re a different type. They’re willing to do the work and take the consequences, but they still aren’t future-focused. I still think that one, perhaps the, definining characterist of all socialist philosophies is a hunter-gatherer mentality that doesn’t see the need for building a future. They assume the universe provides what it provides and they just need to gobble it up as it comes ’round.

Either way, socialists live in the present. Imagine indeed. Imagination is the one thing they don’t have, don’t really need. You don’t have to imagine the present, it’s always here. The future is hwat requires imagination.

jmh @ 40: Either way, socialists live in the present. Imagine indeed. Imagination is the one thing they don’t have, don’t really need. You don’t have to imagine the present, it’s always here. The future is hwat requires imagination.

Traditionally, the third world lives in the present like that, they have not gone through the Renaissance and Enlightenment as has the west, they do not have the idea of Progress in their blood and bones, or even of change or time. Things – are. The Chinese language has no tenses – that is, no conjugations. We in the west appreciate Zen for its timelessness, its focus, its unconcern with hypotheticals far in the future. BUT, can you have a western culture and society, without all that fuss? Nope. I’ve had this discussion on several occassions in regards to how IT projects work with our third-world staff, though no doubt even the American culture has its own problems these days, having totally lost the goal-based business culture of the 1950s through about the 1970s. The worker bees have roles, the elite are all rent-seekers and short-sighted ones at that who won’t even repair the plumbing.

I’m commenting less on the cultural roles here because I find it all too depressing, in particular not having any idea of how one even begins to turn it around, and thinking it’s likely to take decades to see results in any case. I see it in practice in the business cultures where I work, where I shop, in the business pages, and in society. But it requires all this meta-talk and academic abstraction to get into, other than the dabbling we do on it here, where is there any serious forum for heavy lifting in these areas – given that the academy is 99% stuck in brainless lefty modes. Ugh.

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r @ 39: I hope Fitzgerald had it wrong, but certainly what he saw is a rich society in a mode to grind itself – itself – to hamburger.

JMH 40,
I’d say the juvenile supporters of socialism, once they are slapped in the face by reality, either grow up quickly and get to work, or they throw in the towel, yielding to the socialist death wish, and begin their spiral into the drain.

I’d say the implementers of socialism throw in the towel up front because they already know the entire socialist enterprise is a spiral into the drain; the implementers just want a luxurious and hopefully long ride down, and if possible a quick hop-off at the end. If, as is usually the case, there is no exit out of the spiraling drain, the implementers of socialism are willing to go down, yielding to the socialist death wish, “Laughing and whispering into your ear: ‘Come down with me, friend!’”

“And still, you personified mankind, I may take you by the power of my mighty hands and crush with fierce force. In the meantime, as the abyss gapes before me and you in the darkness, You will fall in it and I’ll follow you, Laughing and whispering into your ear: “Come down with me, friend!” Karl Marx

Having enjoyed ”Eaters Of The Dead” hugely I was very disappointed in ”The 13th Warrior”; I could hardly find anything of the book in the film which was, to me, very hard to understand. I believe I’ve read all Crichton’s novels, and some non-fiction also, and ”Eaters” and ”The Great Train Robbery” were the best of them all.

Why they didn’t just stay closer to the book I’ll never know but that’s my explanation for why it was such a flop. And Antonio Banderas? Ehhhh …..

Fitzgerald’s characters are expressing a profound sense of loss and the equally profound feelings of demoralization consequent thereto. For these men, the physical devastation wrought by the war is as nothing compared to the moral and spiritual devastation and dislocation it inflicted. Whether or not they are right or wrong about being able to do it all again is really quite beside the point. The point is,they and their civilization have been terribly and perhaps irreparably wounded, and they know it.

“The 13th Warrior” was deeply flawed, I’ll grant you that. But the problems with the theatrical release were attributable in large measure to decisions by the studio heads to drastically trim the length of the original. The result was a certain degree of incoherence.

“Traditionally, the third world lives in the present like that, they have not gone through the Renaissance and Enlightenment as has the west, they do not have the idea of Progress in their blood and bones, or even of change or time. Things – are. The Chinese language has no tenses – that is, no conjugations. We in the west appreciate Zen for its timelessness, its focus, its unconcern with hypotheticals far in the future. BUT, can you have a western culture and society, without all that fuss?”

The Third World has its “timeless” Zen stuff precisely because it has nothing to look FORWARD to. Why we ever bought into this as a “fashion” remains inexplicable. What’s to “appreciate”?

Concerning Ron Paul: I agree with stoicheion @ 6. Also, the Blast From the Past @ 11 comment is correct:

“It is my belief that Ron Paul is aided by allies of the far left and supporters of Obama. His followers include bigots and he encourages Truthers and other fantasists who weaken us.”

MarcH @ 23 was also correct when he said:

“It’s pathetic that the Paul’s supporters are anointing this nasty little clown as some combination of Jefferson and William Tell …. There is so much with which to discredit Paul.”

Maybe the Paul-bots who come to Belmont Club are sincere. However, I’m more inclined to believe they are Obama campaign workers doing their best for socialism and the West’s collapse.

On the issues of balancing the federal budget and Austrian school economics, I actually agree with Ron Paul. However the rest of his Libertarian nonsense is utter garbage and makes Ron Paul hopelessly unelectable. He’s Obama’s dream opponent.

Concerning the thread’s topic: “Religion in Europe”. Years ago, I lived in Goettingen, Germany. Goettingen has several medieval churches that were made around the 1500s. They are extremely beautiful. One of them “St.-Johannis-Kirche” was perfectly framed in my bedroom window and a joy to behold in the morning. However these old churches are obsolete in terms of modern day religious architecture. Christians in Goettingen tended to avoid the old churches and use only modern ones. However, Europe has become more secular. That’s partially a Cold War side effect due to decades of Gramscian agitprop poison being pumped into Western Europe by Soviet operatives. Also, religion did not distinguish itself during the rise of fascism in the 1930s and offered only muted opposition when the Nazis revealed what monsters they truly were. There were exceptions like Martin Niemoller and few others who did stand up to the Nazis but their efforts were mostly ineffective. It can be argued that European Christianity has not yet rehabilitated itself after its poor performance during WW-II.

What the hell was the point of a comment like that? Why did you even waste a post if that’s all you had to say?

It is a particularly ironic statement of yours, considering that the post in question was a prolegomena for a common understanding of the very civilizational crisis we are now discussing, and that it in no wise reduced to me having a problem with the Catholic Church, but was rather my attempt to show that an a posteriori analysis of the nature and experience of faith precludes the latter’s compatibility with political liberalism; all of which has been, in case you weren’t paying attention, a major theme on this website since as long as I can remember.

Don’t you think that that sort of project is kind of important, given the times we live in? Don’t you think that it might be, or ought to be, of interest to the sort of person who wants to understand what’s wrong with our society and how to fix it, and who correspondingly would be drawn to sites like this one? And yet this is what you decide to dissimulate and role your eyes at? Of all the garbage on the internet that justly merits condemnation, it is this—and me—for which you have reserved your ridicule? That is unbelievable. I don’t know why I even try sometimes.

You might want to take the time to understand what I wrote before you start commenting on it. And when you comment, you should engage my arguments instead of sticking your (inapposite) labels on me. Now anybody who reads your #16 without familiarizing themselves with the entire conversational context, is going to think that I’ve made a reputation for myself as a persistent anti-Catholic agitator, when that isn’t the case at all. Now I will have to take additional measures to explain that I am not only very pro-Catholic, but I am a Catholic (for crying out loud—and one of the only ones) who is not a liberal, not an ecumenist, not in bed with Democratic Party, and who is trying his hardest to rescue his Church, and the civilization she created, from our common enemies (no thanks to you).

That comment was completely unnecessary and very disappointing. If you want to disagree with me, fine; but do not dissimulate the things I’ve said. I will not—I cannot—allow that. I have always been very clear about what I stand for, and the people who read me deserve to know who they’re dealing with.

I don’t agree with you what you said. You clearly have a problem with that. You also, clearly, have a problem with the substance and nature of my disagreement. Too bad. I also don’t like your white-hot anger nor the self-importance and drama that fuels it. As for not allowing me to do whatever–also too bad. What are you going to do, crawl through your keyboard and punch me?

“I’m commenting less on the cultural roles here because I find it all too depressing, in particular not having any idea of how one even begins to turn it around, and thinking it’s likely to take decades to see results in any case. I see it in practice in the business cultures where I work, where I shop, in the business pages, and in society. But it requires all this meta-talk and academic abstraction to get into, other than the dabbling we do on it here, where is there any serious forum for heavy lifting in these areas – given that the academy is 99% stuck in brainless lefty modes.”

I also find our current situation very depressing. However there maybe solutions possible: I think the first step is to recognize that we are in a very deep hole and need to stop digging, i.e. stop kicking the can down the road and actually address our society’s serious problems.

Insolvent institutions (government and private enterprise) need to be recognized, forced into bankruptcy and their remaining assets auctioned off.

Criminals and socialists need to be recognized for what they are. The criminals need to be tried for their crimes and punished. Socialists need to be publicly shamed. Their sponsoring organizations need to be revealed and stripped of their assets or forced out of the country.

We as a people need to acknowledge that our minds were poisoned by decades of Gramscian agitprop. Those who continue to promote Gramscian agitprop need to be publicly shamed and stripped of all authority.

We as a people need to have a public discussion about how to actually reconstruct our economy into something that is sustainable (not based upon burning fossils, living off our ancestor’s assets or government forced transferal of wealth from productive people to the unproductive).

We also need to have a very frank and open discussion about what constitutes “justice”, how our legal system has failed and how we were betrayed by the Gramscian agitprop that is pervasive in our entertainment media and education system.

Unfortunately, I suspect the American people are not yet at the point where we can engage in honest introspection. The economy has to first fully implode and the political process behind Obama needs to be revealed for the disaster that it obviously is. We need to go through significantly more pain before we are ready for healing.

The veiled charges of racism/bigotry/anti-semitism/homophobia are right out of the Obama/Jarret/Alinsky/ playbook, and yet you accuse Paul of being the Democrat puppet. Far more likely it is that the Republican establishment want Paul to win the election even less than the Democrats, and so Paul is catching it from both sides.

I am so sick of this entire racist bugaboo, especially coming from contributors here and if that is the best you can come up with then I suggest you look in the mirror the next time you are pissed off that the Democrats take out a Palin or a Cain using these same tactics.

I also can’t understand the entire 9/11 thing, do you honestly believe that the government has told us the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Some would argue that we are better off never knowing the truth.

Ron Paul gets it, he has been right all along and the more what he has been saying comes true the more many will hate him. Well just wait until the dollar dies because of more of the same (Gingrich/Romney) can kicking. The decay of morality will accelerate with the decay of the dollar. Speculation, prostitution, starvation and despondency are what we are facing and it will correlate perfectly with the demise of rest the middle classes savings. Ron Paul knows this. The first step towards arresting the complete demise of the middle class is to provide them with a stable means to save. Roosevelt outlawed the possession of gold for this reason, Ron Paul would give it back.

The Third World has its “timeless” Zen stuff precisely because it has nothing to look FORWARD to. Why we ever bought into this as a “fashion” remains inexplicable. What’s to “appreciate”?

Hakuna matata, or at least the fantasy of it. No worries, no need to work extra-hard for tomorrow’s gain, just do the minimum and accept whatever pittance the universe, or the local Lord-of-the-Manor, sees fit to grant you. Of course, you could worry about whether the Lord-of-the-Manor would give you anything at all, or if he might decide to kill you and take your land (or your daughter) for himself. But what’s the point of worrying about that? Once you’ve bought into your pesantship, you couldn’t stop him if you wanted to. So just accept whatever…

Josh/38

jmh @ 32: By what standard are our financial markets unregulated?

By the standards that we find ourselves with TBTF.

It was argued by the banksters, and accepted by the (supposedly) free-market Republicans, that the rational self-interest of the banks in an unregulated market would prevent failures. Bzzt, wrong. The Democrats, apparently, were simply bought off.

That’s still not an unregulated market. You’re missing my main point, which is that the extensive regulations imposed on the financial markets prevented the self-interest of the banks from working properly.

For example, the (small regional) bank I used to have my business account with was forced to sell out to one of the TBTF banks in 2009 by the regulators, who threatened to sieze the small bank. The Board had to conduct a firesale, and thus the TBTF bank got even bigger…

It’s not agitprop, at least not what I think that word means. That’s too easy an explanation because it suggests that the “right” kind of manipulation would make us better people without something more transforming taking place.

The Zeitgeist (for lack of a better word) is left/liberal/socialist. For reasons I cannot explain the ideas that all truth is relative, that life has no purpose beyond breathing green air, and that credentialed people who make the most noise get to rule the roost have caught on big time in the American mind. Like it or not that is the system default for the time being.

The attraction that you can get, and that you deserve, status, respect, three squares and Air Jordans just by showing up is compelling. Who is to say that is not the right way of doing things when you have absolutely nothing to compare it to? If there’s any agitprop going on this is where we’ll find it.

Nobody wants to be a Jeremiah but it seems that the blackness of the social mood is enough in and of itself to crash a system that relies on innovation and optimism. Who knows what will come out the other side, but it will be different.

One of the dangers of consorting only with like minded people, as we do here, is the opportunity to view everything through the tunnel vision of our own prejudices. I would not be surprised if Wretchard had written this piece just to see how prejudiced we are because I can not imagine that he would willfully ignore all the other causes of low birth rates, nor that he would put the individual’s depression about the far future ahead of the far more immediate causes. He presses the button and the hare is out of the gate, he sits back and watches the hounds chase a ball of inanimate fluff round in circles!

Until the sixties people had sex and then they had babies. At least till the fifties there was, essentially, no competition for one’s attention, save the delights of chopping wood or the occasional visit to the theatre (most of the plays I have seen it amounts to the same thing.) In the sixties there was a paradigm shift in the West which is still and slowly spreading across the world.

For a start, with the advent of the pill and other reliable contraceptives sex no longer meant babies pro rata. Yes, we had more sex (well some did, somehow I got left out,) but birth rates didn’t go up, in fact since bearing children became a choice (yeah, blame the socialists!) they went down. Then came HIV and the availability of partners went down, maybe not to their original level, so birthrates declined some more. Then came planned parenthood. Suddenly sensible people left having babies until their thirties, and with the dual income required era till their late thirties, then for some it was too late.

The other great contraceptive of our time is television. Like it or hate it, most of us watch television five or six nights a week. Your average pre television couple went to bed and , often enough, made babies. Now we wait up for CSI and follow it with the news till midnight. With such a potent distraction it’s a wonder anyone has any kids at all. Don’t think that’s true? Ask a hospital administrator what happens nine months after a big power outage. Check birthrates against sweeps or reruns.

I don’t doubt that TV played it’s part in distracting us. But until recently we also entertained ourselves. We sat out on steps, played card games with neighbors, had people over for chess games or went out to the basketball court to playing under artificial lights. In all of these there were opportunities to engage in shennanigans, and people often did.

But then other factors were in play. The first was that children were social security. Just recently the mother of a friend who is gainfully employed in the Philippines , was a former undersecretary of natural resources who owns a condo and an expensive car lamented that her son had no children. “Who will take care of you in your old age?” she asked. Children were security.

With the advent of the welfare state or its equivalence in pensions, a lot of the incentive to have children went away. The other factor is the opportunity cost of having kids. The job of raising kids became expensive in reputational terms for women (“I am just a housewife”) and because it became so elaborate. You just couldn’t leave the kids to run around the neighborhood before dinner any more.

Now there may be other factors, but the fact remains that there is a strong correlation between welfare states and demographic distortion. Even China couldn’t stay out of the family. Their one-child family policy will have catastrophic results.

It is not that socialism per se causes a collapsing demography. That route can be accessed by other paths. But the policies and ethos of socialism tends to produce societies in which the future is devalued. One other data point. Nearly all socialist countries are environmental catastrophes. Eastern Europe produced so much pollution that merely switching over to capitalism gave them environmental credits for decades. North Korea is denuded, etc etc. Show me a socialist country and I’ll show you an environmental disaster.

And why? Because socialist incentives cannot reflect, both in natural resource economies or human economies, the correct discount value. It gets its price signals from central planning. Or it uses central planning to distort market signals. So the vanishing future is in essence a discount rate problem, whether that is reflected in deficit financing or a collapsing demography.

The general nature of the problem was suggested to me when I was in the forest consultancy game in the form an empirical question. Why was it that forest areas under rebel (NPA or MNLF) control remained just as bad as those under Philippine government control?

I would sometimes come to an area which was alternately logged by the rebels and the Philippine military. The rebels were up in the woods some days and the military on others. In fact the only woods that were decently managed were those which actually belonged to someone.

The country rep of the WWF and I had a long debate one day at a Davao hotel. I said, “if you want to preserve the forests, title them to the tribes or sell them to private parties”. He was aghast. “Do you mean to say,” he said, “that you’ll allow private parties to own forest?”

“Sure,” I said. “And they can cut and sell the wood as they please.” This produced an even greater horror. He asked, “how can forests be managed for profit?” He refused to credit the possibility.

I explained that the intellectual lineage of discount rate owed much to forestry. Back in the day, when charcoal became big in Germany, the woodsmen cut down the surrounding forest until they ran out of woods. Then one day a German monk had an idea.

What if you could sell trees that were harvestable in the future? So the monk identified block parcels which were planted to even aged stands. After ten years you had stands of 10, 9, 8 … 1 years of age. Assuming they were harvestable in 20 years, then stand 10 would be ready to harvest in another ten years, stand 9 in eleven, etc.

As a block was harvested it was replanted. Things rotated around so that you never ran out of trees. There was always a stand in the pipeline. To support the enterprise you had to value things which were only realizable in the future. You needed a discount rate by which you could sell a future stand of trees. You needed other things besides. Contracts, property rights. Law. Only then could forests survive.

The WWF man listened to me with increasing disdain. His comeback was always, “profit is bad.” My comeback is that only profit ensures that the future has a value. Without profit, the future has no value except as a bureaucrat assigns it. As proof, I invited him to compare the conditions of forests under private management and those under the government forestry department.

He grimaced. “Well that is because of corruption. What we need is to cleanse government culture of greed and then there will be no corruption.” I brought up the rebels and said, “well if dyed in the wool communists act just looters of the commons what hope for extirpating corruption?” In fact, I argued, it was greed that created rational practice. Unless people were motivated by greed, they would never protect the forest. “People will protect the forest only if they expect to benefit from it.”

He recoiled, I remember, like Faust from Mephistopheles. “Profit!” he said. “It can never work.”

Well the last time I checked the forests managed according to his principles of idealism were all gone. And those managed under greed were still there. The right discount rate — the real value of the future — can only exist where there is a market for its value. If you let the politicians set the value of the future, they will debauch our tomorrows to bribe voters today.

One of the ways you tell whether a forest is dying is to look at its age structure. A healthy forest has lots of little trees, fewer middle sized trees and relatively few big trees. Susutainable foresty is the process of identifying trees which at the older end of the age distribution and taking them before rot does. A dying forest has no little trees because they rebels have dragged the harvestable trees across the forest floor with a winch in the harvesting process and smashed them. If you look at European demography you can see something that is structured just like that.

It’s a dying human forest. Europe cannot rationally continue down that path. It’s just as simple as that.

“Because there’s no commandment against killing people in the Bible, just a commandment against two women kissing. Check. I don’t want to start a debate about whether it is right or wrong to kill thieves rather than apprehend them, but that sure is an interesting mindset, that sending teenagers off into eternity bothers you less than a lesbian kiss.#13. Teresita

No, Teresita. I won’t send teenagers into battle. I’ll lead them. And I’ll take my son and daughter with me if it comes to that, because some battles in life have to be fought by people who care less of themselves than of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

As far as Lesbian sailors: I’m opposed to both women in combat, or combat at risk roles (as is every position aboard a Navy vessel), and certainly the LGBT agenda. The military is used for breaking things and killing people. The faster and more effectively we do that, the fewer of our own people will die. Women in combat and the LGBT social experiment means FEWER effective war fighters, MORE dead Americans, and at worst case, loss of the mission.

I live in the real world. Liberal-make-believe ideas makes the real world a damn dangerous place.

Finally, I’d prefer you stop quoting a Bible in which you do not believe, for the singular purpose of mocking those who do believe in Christ. Half truths are the worse, most damnable lies of all.

I think that this is a misinterpretation. Jesus was never against people getting together to worship as a group. In the Garden of Gethsemane, he asked His apostles to stay up and pray along with Him. He also regularly attended the Temple in Jerusalem.

The point that He was trying to make is that it is hypocritical to be loud and ostentatious in one’s prayers. Those who do that are trying to impress other people, rather than communicating with God.

@57. Wretchard: “With the advent of the welfare state or its equivalence in pensions, a lot of the incentive to have children went away.”

The welfare state was/is financed with fiat money. Governments have been stealing the wealth of their citizens by printing fiat and then covering it up by any means possible. They used this loot to stay in power by giving people things that they could not otherwise afford, one of which was life without children. But by manipulating the discount rate of money that underlies everything else, their corruption has leaked into every nook and cranny of our entire lives.

So how do we start to put society back on a solid foundation? With solid money whose value is outside the control of the government. Only one politician in the entire world has been driving this fact home and fighting for honest money for decades.

…children were social security. Just recently the mother of a friend who is gainfully employed in the Philippines , was a former undersecretary of natural resources who owns a condo and an expensive car lamented that her son had no children. “Who will take care of you in your old age?” she asked. Children were security.

With the advent of the welfare state or its equivalence in pensions, a lot of the incentive to have children went away…

yes, and people make the mistake of thinking money is a thing. Especially a thing they can save up and spend in the future. But it’s not a thing, it’s a measurment. You can’t really save dollars any more than you can save inches or degrees Celsius. All you really have is some claim on future goods and services, but the money doesn’t automatically cause those goods and services to exist.

An 80 year old with a leaky roof needs a 25 year old to go up there and fix it. Doesn’t matter how much money they saved up, if they didn’t have kids, they didn’t help to supply the thing most needed – 25 year old grandsons. Maybe they can trade some horded dollars for the temporary attention of someone else’s grandson, but that roofer is going to be able to charge hefty rates because he’s a scarce commodity.

So, yet another way in which prosperity messed us up. We had lots of goods and services to measure with our dollars, and confused the dollars with the goods and services we were measuring. Lost sight of how those goods and services came to be in the first place. It’s like the old joke about the city kid who thinks the answer to “where does corn come from?” is “the Supermarket.” Where does future prosperity come from? It doesn’t come from 401k accounts. It sure doesn’t come from Social Security, or from a pension plan administered by the Fraternal Brotherhood of Picket Sign Wavers. It comes from productive grandkids working at productive jobs.

Two words: Black Plague. Swept through Europe and killed off a third of the population. Young and old, rich and poor, all fell before the Grim Reaper. Wasn’t the end of Western civilization. Tough times followed for sure, but Europe rebounded. Same will happen again. There will be a shift in culture so that motherhood and children will be honored and valued again. Populations will stablize and then begin to grow again. If you haven’t noticed it is already underway. Jen is having twins (at 42 no less) as is the future Queen of England. Stories abound about the stars having their babies. The ship of culture is slowing changing course. Women, god love them, are creatures of fashion and when it is fashionable to have kids, they’ll have them. And probably more than their partners counted on.

JMH: Yes, and people make the mistake of thinking money is a thing. Especially a thing they can save up and spend in the future. But it’s not a thing, it’s a measurment. You can’t really save dollars any more than you can save inches or degrees Celsius.

JMH makes a very important point here. The idea of money is not to be confused with the value-token itself. And in the last analysis money is nothing more than an idea, a purely extensional something-or-other which is spread over the field of wealth in order to denominate values. That is why it can be manipulated by purely intellectual means. Real wealth can be earned, taken, grown, or inherited, but it cannot simply be notionalized into existence—unlike money. Everyone who now laments the inflationary destruction of our currency (and I count myself among them) will have reason to complain about its merely notional value, as though it were of no more account than blank pieces of paper circulating around. But wait…maybe there’s something to that idea which we have not fully considered.

In order for the idea of money to be fully self-consistent, the highest and purest form of money should be entirely notional. The value-token ought to have no independent value of its own: it ought to be nothing but blank pieces of paper circulating around—or if possible something even less substantial than that. The Keynesians weren’t stupid after all. Wrong, yes, but not stupid. They grasped the essentially Gnostic character of money better than anyone else. There was not to be, in their view, any unnatural liaisons between matter and form, no Hypostatic Union of pure, spiritual money with base, material gold. When the value-token itself has value, money can never really come into its own as an independent, liberated force. Exchange in specie is still just barter, even if it is barter in a common coin. Furthermore, the Keynesian had thought they’d seen the writing on the wall with the Great Depression. When value-tokens are valuable in themselves, then in times of economic uncertainty people will hoard them, thus withdrawing them from circulation and bringing about a deflationary collapse. Their answer to this was sublimely simple: flood the economy with notional money in order to grease the skids of commerce. The plan had the “beneficial” (from their point of view) side effect of destroying the value of savings (hoardings), liquidating the wealth that was represented therein and pumping it into circulation. Of course, in order for it all to work properly, draconian measures had to be taken to prevent people from trading in anything other than the fiat currency, otherwise the inflation just would have increased the value of the previous value-tokens along with everything else, and there would have been no net transformation of the economy. Against the osmotic gradient of Gresham’s law, bad money must be made not to drive good money into hoards, but to flush it out of its hiding places and gobble it. This explains FDR’s prohibition on the private ownership of gold.

But it was above all the finance-men themselves who embraced the concept of liberated money. It was, according to them, not things which had value, but our relations to things, our “positions,” the latter being an abstraction only and hence a suitable object for the operations of notional money. So began the furious process of arbitraging which we today know of as finance. Before the Keynesian Revolution the finance sector was only the servant of the market; now it wrestled the market to the ground and made itself master. The era we are living in—the era which is now coming to a close—has been colored predominantly by the liberation of money as an independent force, a force knowing neither quantitative limitation nor qualitative distinction, but sweeping up all before it in a conflagration of sophisticated plunder.

And how shall it all end? We must bear in mind that we can only go forward to the future, not back to the past. It will not be possible to simply reinstitute a gold standard—not yet. Our entire political economy and way of life is not compatible with specie. The money-men have spread a system of interlocked financial tensions over the entire globe. They have brought the situation to such an intense focus that it is now scintillating with portentous groanings. The resolution will require a different kind of man to appear on the scene: somebody who will amass huge fortunes, not because he delights in making money, but because he wants to rule. Then he will bring the financial powers to their knees, and he will say to them, “You tried to put the value of your own will in place of the value of gold, but you forgot that my will, the will to power itself, is weightier than yours.” After intellect destroyed culture, and money destroyed intellect, money is itself overthrown and abolished by blood. The coming of the Caesar-man snaps the tensions and reacquaints the world with the primordial facts of existence. It is only there and then that the etiolated life of decadent ages finds its level again.

They thirst for erasure of all boundary, social or political, personal or otherwise. In their imagined paradise of unity they dream of a smooth,ripple-less body of being that stretches for eternity. If anything sounds like Hell, that describes it.

Of course, boundaries are problematic to the ambitious devourers of men. Without a boundary, a Right cannot be asserted. This is why our children are given no goals, no absolutes, no judgments while in school. It leaves them malleable for all sorts of violations.

OK! I will speak the cure to our problems in the American/Western world. World War! One big nasty knock down death struggle! Nothing and I mean Nothing clears the air like a big everybody gets drafted WAR, Reality will quickly come to all, old values will become prized and held high again, foxhole conversions will bring real Christian meaning front and center! Let’s face it the absences of war has lead to the vast majority of or nations problems. little wars like Iraq, Afghan, Vietnam… don’t count, I am talk’s Massive National sacrifice, everybody has skin in the game WAR and one that hits home here in America, far too long we as a nation have slept snug in our beds, no taste of gunpowder or cinders, no risk or lose of property. Yes a big war has no certain ending and could be the end of America! But where are we now?

I think the reports of the death of Christianity in Europe are somewhatexaggerated. While the traditional liberal and State churches are declining, the emerging and house church movements are growing. House churches grew at a rate of 22% in 2010, with approximately 23% of the growth being new converts and 77% being Christians who moved from traditional to non-traditional congregations. The movements are relatively small, but it represents an interesting change in Christian practice to better meet the needs of modern populations.

Socialism and social welfare programs have destroyed the family by no longer requiring people to depend upon each other. They’ve replaced the family and community safety net with the social safety net.

There is no use for the father as long as government handouts pay the bills; there is no use for the elderly as state-subsidized daycare is available; there is no use for children as Social Security has been promoted as being able to take care of us all. There is no use for a spouse since there is Medicaid and SSDI. Of course, these benefits are all somewhat illusory, as anyone who has taken advantage of these programs will attest, but they’re enough to interfere with how people view the utility of family.

I remember taking a master’s level course in long-term care. The attitude among the students and faculty was predictable right down party lines, and party lines also predicted the family situation. Our instructor was absolutely desperate that we all come to see the light about (very expensive) long-term care insurance, and I couldn’t understand her vehemence until the day one of the more outspoken members of the class said, “I’ll take care of my wife, and my kids will take care of me. What about you, prof?”

Well, being childless and single, she didn’t really have a good answer for that.

Don51 (#2) – The example of the Great Plains occurred to me too, but precisely in the context of a failure of socialism, in this case an immense subsidy in the form of the Homestead Acts. Give land away for free and people will take it, for a while. But tomorrow comes.

Christianity cannot “change to meet the needs of modern populations.” Christianity is what it is. If it is not One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic, it is not Christianity. House Churches, Evangelical Protestantism, and the Charismatic Movement are all just superficial mantles under which the modernist attitude flourishes undiminished. Look at how the people in those sects behave. Are they any different from their surrounding secular countrymen? No, and that’s precisely the point.

The alternative church movement is one of the main breeding grounds of ecumenism, multiculturalism, homosexual tolerance, social progressivism, radical environmentalism, and sentimentality—in short, all the things that are corroding Western Civilization. They might as well just style themselves “Wiccans For Christ,” “Chriccans” if you will. They are not a solution, they are part of the problem.

Real Christianity involves much more than just using the name ‘Christ’ as a legitimator of your preexisting stock of beliefs. It involves submitting to His gospel, submitting to the sacramental system and disciplinary authority of the Church, adopting an orthodox interpretation of Sacred Scripture and Tradition, living a moral life, and becoming familiar with at least the rudiments of the Church’s philosophical outlook. Alternative Churches do exactly none of that; the reason being that they do not want to, because they are comfortable being modernists.

If our society is going to have more children women need to be convinced that being a mother and homemaker is a respected ocupation. It certainly is not now. They will also need to be reasonably certain that they will have a dependable husband provider and that marrage will be stable. Men will have to be convinced that marrage for them is worth while. Who wants to be on the hook to support children to which practically he has no rights? Marrage will have to give increased status and oppertunity to the husbands. I believe that as the playing field has become more tilted to the wives the men have become less willing to marry.

One thing that did work in the past was normally to give custody of the children to the father. This tended to mitigate against divorce because the father did not want to try raising his children alone and the mother did not want to lose custody if her children. A bonus was that the father usuallu had the better paying job so there was less pressure on the courts to collect child support. Mean spirited persons would take great pleasue in the howls of protests from the femminists.

Wretchard, I’ve been wrestling with your discount rate analogy overnight. Another way of putting it would be to say the the Net Present Value of a socialist (statist) future is zero or less than zero. This would imply that the future cash flows are negative, the discount rate is negative, or the purchase price is negative (or any two or all three).

There could be number of reasons for this:

* Rent seeking
* The state suppressing individual creativity to make the “plan” work
* The state failing to invest in citizens outside of the elites (the 40-70% who don’t get tracked into “trade schools” at 13 or 14 years of age)
* The gross inefficiencies of a planned economy

The high populations of the Great Plains is a historical anomaly. For distinct historical reasons it temporarily became a desirable place, mostly because of lack of other options and yes, free land. If you look to pre-Columbian times (before disease collapsed the Indian population) the plains were still pretty sparse. The Indians we think of as Plains Indians are actually from Minnesota and only moved west to escape Euro encroachment, helped by their adaptation of the horses.

Yes, the entire US is urbanizing at a great clip, but even small cities are getting larger. In north America, urbanization actually means suburbs. Much denser than the small towns (like the plains town I grew up in), but not strictly urban has most people think of the word.

Many cities have whole suburbs that are not the legacy of flight from the cities, but are settlements of former country folk. Close enough the work and convenience of the city, but just an hour or two from grandpa’s ‘farm.’

A good article, but you have the wrong “ism.” While socialism is certainly horrid, the cause of many of today’s population woes is feminism. Women’s talk of loving children and wanting to have them has always been just that, talk. Pretending to be positive about something you couldn’t avoid was making the best of a bad situation. Having kids takes a hell of a toll on a woman’s body, not to mention a risk of dying in childbirth, then decades of work raising the kids.

When feminism gave women greater choices by replacing the need for a husband with state support, and by providing convenient birth control and abortion all bets were off. Women in developed countries choose to have less children, if they have any, and they have them later in life, when their eggs are less healthy. Women’s evolved tendencies toward narcissism, acquisitiveness, and hypergamy (which are adapative in the state of nature) become maladaptive traits that lead to massive growth of the welfare state, and sap society of wealth and social cohesion, making the population crisis even worse.

You’ll notice that you don’t see the population crisis (nor the runaway welfare state) in countries where women are denied power, denied birth control, denied state support, and denied access to abortion. Those countries have other problems, but having children isn’t one of them.

“It can be argued that European Christianity has not yet rehabilitated itself after its poor performance during WW-II.”

Are you saying that the sitting pope being a former Hitler Youth and a NAZI isn’t rehabilitating? To me it shows that the current Church has seen the light. Now if they would just stop raping little boys…..

Confed H. POTUS needing the OK from Congress to wage war was a GREAT idea in the 18th and 19th century. When a fast ship takes 16 days to cross the Atlantic, Having congress deliberate for a few weeks or months before setting in motion a war machine that takes years to move is a good thing. When an ICBM takes 20 minutes to go from Europe to the USA, it is impossible.
The speed and range of modern weapons have made Congresse’s part in War obsolete.

If I was the Mad Dog mullah is chief I would work with Chevez for regime change Mexico and use it as a logistics staging base. Mexico has about 20 million men under 25. Arm them and send them north. How is Ron going to stop them?

Matt (#73) Please don’t reveal in your Catholic History, it is has many very dark periods and individuals as far from Christ as Satan is. The Catholic Church did wonders thru the ages there is no doubt but it is as splintered as the “Protestant” and “Home” churches you despair! Me thinks you should real discern the individual actions and not condemn by whole groups or you too will be judged by the groups history and not your individual actions. In my 24 years of Catholic upbringing in a very strict form (Church every Sunday morning, Fish on Fridays, etc…) I never in the 7 states and nearly twice that in cities attended a Catholic Church that did not seem empty and spiritless (even the 70’s guitar mass was very docile and lifeless), The very first Charismatic church showed me what sprit filled and Love of Jesus gathering really was, Yes in the following 30+ years and many more state/cities I have run into Christian Groups that undoubtedly qualify as Cults but that is where reading the word allowed me to see the truth from the lie something in the 24 years of Catholic upbringing I was never encouraged or told to do (Read the Bible) even during my summers at Catholic training from the age of 12 to 15. Once again the Catholic Church does need to be given its credit for shaping the West into the best hope for man but it doesn’t mean it is the way for all or even most to receive Christ teaching and salvation.

The German government statistical office estimates there will be from 69 to 74 million “Germans” in 2050. I’m guessing ethnic Germans (bio-deutsche) will make up about 70 to 80% of the total. The average age will be 60.

That’s still enough to be a force in the world, especially with the forecasted birthrate implosion in the Muslim world and much of Asia.

Wrong. There is a commandment against murder. The commandment has been mistranslated for centuries.

“Science Major: “Why does it work?”
Engineering Major: “How does it work?”
Women’s Studies Major: “Would you like fries with that?””

Had to laugh. It’s true. However, the third one has still a corrosive effect on society. The graduates aren’t a good marriage material and contribute heavily to the decay of the society at large, and that is not considering the hekatombs of human sacrifices (sugarcoated as “choice”).

If I wanted to drastically reduce population and “make society so corrupt that it stinks”*, I’d likely come up with feminism as means to do it.

Two words: Black Plague. Swept through Europe and killed off a third of the population. Young and old, rich and poor, all fell before the Grim Reaper. Wasn’t the end of Western civilization. Tough times followed for sure, but Europe rebounded.

And one of the positive benefits was the rise in power of the tradesmen and their guilds, and even the improved status of common laborers. Over time this led to the creation of what eventually was known as the middle class, the single greatest human social advance, as far as I’m concerned.

But these tradesmen and laborers had children by their wives. Perhaps fertility will return to a devastated Europe, but by what mechanism?

In the west, taxes were raised to pay for the welfare state. This reduced the amount of money available for people to spend on themselves and their families. So, the mothers were sent out to work and they were taxed as well. Then they also have to pay for childcare too. So that reduces the incentive to have children. Couples are having children later in life because it takes longer to get to a point where the family can get by on one wage. This reduces the amount of time available on the biological clock to have more children and the mother is anxious to get back to work so the family can catch up financially. What the designers of the welfare state forgot were that children have always been necessary to provide care for the old. The only difference is whether that was directly through families, or indirectly through taxes. The thing is, the welfare state adds a layer of bureaucratic parasites that has to be paid for as well. Most working mothers I know (including my wife) would rather be home with their kids than working. At least for the first few years anyway.

What year would you say the West changed? 1950? 1960? Why?
My grandparents, parents and myself lived right through the 20th century and only one thing really changed – women’s emancipation. Men stayed pretty much the same as their grandfathers. I have my grandfather’s war records from 1916-17. He was just like me.

Women didn’t suddenly start having influence in the 1960′s either. It’s a bogus marker. In fact WWII created the 60′s directly, in dozens of ways. One grew from the other.

Japan’s birthrate has also dropped, was that socialism? No it was Japanese women realising they no longer had to accept being tied down.

The people of Japan live under a form of socialism, because socialism is simply excessive government power over the people based on excessive collectivization of the people’s property. Excessive property collectivization occurs under Fascist Socialism (Crony Capitalism), just not to the same degree as Marxist Socialism (Communism). Fascist economics date back at least to the British East India Company, and we have our own perverted version of it here in the United States. The Germans (and the Japanese) perfected Fascist Socialism during the first half of the twentieth century.

“Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation’s economy. The issue of legal ownership, they explained, is secondary; what counts is the issue of control. Private citizens, therefore, may continue to hold titles to property – so long as the state reserves to its self the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property. If “ownership” means the right to determine the use and disposal of material goods, then Nazism endowed the state with every real prerogative of ownership. What the individual retained was merely a formal deed… which conferred no rights on its holder. Under Communism, there is collective ownership of property de jure. Under Nazism, there is the same collective ownership de facto.” Leonard Peikoff

Economic Fascism (Crony Capitalism) unnaturally creates economic inequality (a wealthy class) through the force of government. It follows that Marxists unnaturally seek to create economic equality (except of course for themselves) through the force of government – which can only do so via unequal rights to property. Both Fascism (crony capitalism) and Marxism can exist side by side – propping each other up like two sheaves of corn – that is what is occurring now in the United States.

Perhaps Yurop needs a clearing — the old underbrush and such. It may provide a mechanism that you seek–by burning the nihilism to ashes with the old underbrush. Bezmenov was not talking about US only, the same active measures were deployed in Western Europe. That means there are at least 2 damaged generations here and there. It may take half a century of a dark age, before the ship rights herself.

“I’m done, I did what I was supposed to.” was not a reflection of what is the prerogative of society or social fashions or pressures. It is a description of her “arc”, the realization what was her true purpose. She expressed her existential path and her realization what it is.

In the end we will ALWAYS win. Our (all of us here at PJM) chosen way of life has worked for millenia because it is congruent to human instincts. Communism and socialism will always fall to capitalism given time, because it falls to human nature. It will even fall here.

The West will be reborn in the coming fires, but we must be ready to re-establish the patriarchy when that day comes if we wish to see beyond those dark days.

Patriarchy is a feminist and marxist construct, at least in the context of Western Civilization, for more than a few centuries.

I call it a gender roles social contract, and I mean biological role, not a gender concept framework of feminists that on one hand claim that gender roles are constructs, while on other they define 5 or 6.

It was in evolution for at least 2 millennia and was the backbone of the success of Western Civ. Until our spoil times.

Overall a gradual process. One of the main vector was the large scale urbanization. It enabled anonymity and thus abdication of responsibility (to a degree as the loosening of social constraints allowed).

But that alone would probably not result in the current mess. It was a gradual change and thus possibly adaptable without the social disruption.

The feminism pre-1965 sated goals were emancipation, equality, even in the framework of traditional family where the motherhood was to be acknowledged as work of he same value as any other. But since then (when the goals were largely achieved or in process of reaching them) the tune changed. No longer the motherhood was in the focus. The battle shifted to other areas and the initial family focus became “icky”.

Of course, it is not only feminism that played a role in the sudden change (several decades span). Here is the how Frankfurt School denizens saw it:

Frankfurt School developed a long term plan, “conspiracy to corrupt”*, that was to undermine all western nations traditional institutions and ways of life and all the usual traditional, moral, ethical and self control that usually supports and maintains a healthy balanced society. Now rotted by the pandering to the basest in humanity via government, media, and NGOs.

Then when things fall apart they’d roll in their totalitarian communoglobalist police state.

* The Frankfurt School A gang of Academics , Marxists, Psychologists whose plan to “make the west so corrupt that it would stink” carries on throughout the west today

To further the advance of their “quiet” cultural revolution – but giving us no ideas about their plans for the future – the School recommended (among other things):

1. The creation of perceptual racism offences
2. Continual change to create confusion
3. The teaching of sex and homosexuality to children
4. The undermining of schools’ and teachers’ authority
5. Huge immigration to destroy identity
6. The promotion of excessive drinking
7. Emptying of churches
8. An unreliable legal system with bias against victims of crime
9. Dependency on the state or state benefits
10. Control and dumbing down of media and its consumers
11. Encouraging the breakdown of the family through feminism

One of the main ideas of the Frankfurt School was to exploit Freud’s idea of ‘pansexualism’ – the search for pleasure, the exploitation of the differences between the sexes, the overthrowing of traditional relationships between men and women. To further their aims they would:

• attack the authority of the father, deny the specific roles of father and mother, and wrest away from families their rights as primary educators of their children.
• abolish differences in the education of boys and girls
• abolish all forms of perceived male dominance – increase the presence of women in the armed forces
• declare women to be an ‘oppressed class’ and men as ‘oppressors’

Munzenberg summed up the Frankfurt School’s long-term operation thus: ‘We will make the West so corrupt that it stinks.’

Re-read that last sentence, everyone. Then recall that when John Maynard Keynes, when asked “what about the long run?” with respect to some of his economic proposals, made the crack “In the long run we are all dead.” Har, har, eh? Statist economists loved it. So…here we are!

What you call “Frankfurt School” is another name for “Gramscian agitprop”. For what it’s worth, the primary target of Soviet and East German propaganda during the Cold War was West Germany (the propaganda eventually got to America through social diffusion). It’s my belief the German Green Party was conceived by some Soviet propaganda genius in the KGB (he probably was awarded the Order of Lenin for his efforts). Green politics along with Liberation Theology in the developing world was the Soviet’s ticket to victory in the Cold War. Too bad for them that the Soviet Union imploded before their propaganda efforts paid off….

“Maybe the Paul-bots who come to Belmont Club are sincere. However, I’m more inclined to believe they are Obama campaign workers doing their best for socialism and the West’s collapse.”

I still believe Stoch and his like are sincere and actual human beings rather than swarms of sock puppets unleashed at PJM to defame Ron Paul…but they’re clinging to a Cold War military industrial complex that is fading away rapidly along with the Russian and Chinese enemies it was built to fight. It’s precisely the opposite at PJM as that libertarian blogger Glenn Reynolds linked to earlier today pointed out.

I don’t see the pro-Paul commenters resorting to unsubstantiated garbage if not outright falsehoods (Paul made a million from the disavowed newsletters, really?). Nor do I think the content of the newsletters was substantially worse than the repeated calls by some commenters here, some of whom have moved on or been banned by our esteemed host, for nuclear genocide of various nations or religious groups. Hell, most of the racial stuff was the kinda of routine crap I used to read over at Frontpagemagazine, but nobody’s raking David Horowitz over the coals.

Look, you can jeer Ron Paul all you want. The status quo of endless war and a trillion dollar a year military will be just as unsustainable the day after Paul bows out as the day before. THERE IS NO STASH. NOT for endless welfare schemes, AND NOT FOR ENDLESS WAR. PERIOD. Foreigners will not continue to accept worthless dollars out of massive gratitude for the U.S. being the world’s policeman and securing their oil. They’ll do it themselves.

Teresita, if she is in fact a Pentagon employee, will either see her salary get cut, her pension devalued through inflation, or her health care denied. So will the military retirees I know, love and respect. All so the likes of Frank Gaffney and the other MIC whores who’re working overtime to manipulate you people can have a few more years explaining why the U.S. needs hundreds of bases from Georgia to Uganda to staying in the bloody, useless snakepit that is Afghanistan.

Don’t you people get it? Or do you think poof the money going away only applies to The Left? It applies to all of us! Quit the magical thinking already. If the U.S. is too broke to maintain any social safety net then it is too broke to maintain its huge overseas military presence too.

If the following (all critics of fiat money want to return to the Confederacy, with its own worthless currency) is NOT a pro-Establishment, pro-Fed zombie paid talking point, I defy this person to tell me what isn’t:

Dear confederate redneck, read the below replies and read them good. I have lived around your type for a long time and mostly, your patriotism angle is complete bu**sh*t! In the south, where I am, guess who own and run almost all if not most of the gold and silver exchange shops? You guessed it, the south will rise again types. Trying to convince people that fiat money needs to go away so that you have all the money is not PATRIOTIC! (but of course you knew that you are just a liar).

“The veiled charges of racism/bigotry/anti-semitism/homophobia are right out of the Obama/Jarret/Alinsky/ playbook, and yet you accuse Paul of being the Democrat puppet. Far more likely it is that the Republican establishment want Paul to win the election even less than the Democrats, and so Paul is catching it from both sides.” Yes, yes, and yes.

So what if some kids who would’ve voted for Obama four years ago are crossing over to vote for Paul? Is that a bad thing? None of them are going to vote for Newtomney or Rick ‘I’m suing Virginia because my people were too disorganized to get on the ballot there unlike four candidates in 2008′ Perry. They would either stay home or vote for Obama. Think people, The New Republic where this newsletter brouahaha started is a Democrat rag, albeit a hawkish Democrat one that was all for bombing the Serbs into the stone age and supported the Iraq war.

Look, you can jeer Ron Paul all you want. The status quo of endless war and a trillion dollar a year military will be just as unsustainable the day after Paul bows out as the day before. THERE IS NO STASH. NOT for endless welfare schemes, AND NOT FOR ENDLESS WAR. PERIOD.

Just a small objection here.

First, use of the phrase “endless war” should be re-thought b/c it makes the user sound like a parrot. As a criticism of policy, it has become a hackneyed phrase. Try a little harder for something original, por favor.

Second, and more important, we have the left to thank for “endless war.” “Endless war” is what you get when you make victory impossible.

We also have the left to thank for our state of “endless politics.” I would venture to say that that is even more destructive to our Republic and exhausting to its citizens than the much-bandied-about “endless war” syndrome. Funny how you never hear the left condemning endless politics, though.

Fish, water, no perception of wet.

However, I do agree with the statement that there is no stash. We have met the enemy and he is us, and we is broke.

I’m guessing to some extent here, but your entire post sounds to me much like “submit to the authority of the Catholic Church”. Even if I called myself a Christian, which I do not, I would disagree with that.

This is a Church that arranged for people to burned at the stake for the heinous crime of allowing people to read the Bible in a language they could understand; that burned Guirdano Bruno at the stake for questioning doctrine; that submitted Galileo to twenty years of house arrest for uttering the truth; that stood by while thousands of people were tortured to death for the non-existent crime of witchcraft; that to this day continues to cover up the disgusting crimes of its own priests (who by the way are breaking their own sacred vows) in their wholesale molestation of children; that condones systematic torture of vulnerable children (of whom I was one) by sadists who call themselves monks and nuns. And that’s just a start. One might also mention the election of an unrepentant Nazi as Pope.

Vatican City is somewhat less of a pesthole than Mecca. But not by very much. Even Catholic doctrine against effective contraception is more of a political ploy (attempting to gain more power by having more worshippers) than a religious one.